Essays and information calling for Americans to choose a public option for national health care, with a particular emphasis on the excesses and abuses of health insurance companies in our current system.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Money and the Power

Just a brief note: I have to go talk about kigo in a train station cocktail lounge.

This article in the Guardian tries to count the obscenely huge amounts ($380 million!) that the insurance industry has spent in its quest to prevent a strong public option, or any other reforms that might affect their income. Sad, perhaps-I-will-have-a-cocktail-in-abovementioned-lounge ironic twist: it's our premium money they're using to buy off our own elected officials.

The other notable thing about the article is that it relies in part on officials from the Clinton administration, who are a particularly interesting kind of witness, having themselves gone up against the opposition to reform and failed. Here is Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, explaining the public option in concrete terms:

EDIT: sorry about the overlap with the sidebar -- Reich is ok-looking, but I'm not so sure that anybody really needs to see him in widescreen. We should at least have the option to see him in a variety of dimensions, but alas.